Chapter One
The Logic of American Populism: From the People’s Party to George Wallace
Chapter Two
Neoliberalism and Its Enemies: Perot, Buchanan, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street
Chapter Three
The Silent Majority and the Political Revolution: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
Chapter Four
The Rise of European Populism
Chapter Five
The Limits of Leftwing Populism: Syriza and Podemos
Chapter Six
Rightwing Populism on the March in Northern Europe
Conclusion
The Past and Future of Populism
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Notes
What Is Populism, and Why Is It Important?
Populist parties and candidates are on the move in the United States and Europe. Donald Trump has won the Republican nomination; Bernie Sanders came in a very strong second to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. And these candidacies came on the heels of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements.

…

Micah White, the American senior editor of Adbusters who helped inspire the movement, called it a “constructive failure.” In the 2012 election, Obama borrowed from Occupy Wall Street’s rhetoric to pillory Republican Mitt Romney. And Occupy’s radicalism would recur in more organized form—when a Vermont senator would decide to run for president in 2016.
The Silent Majority and the Political Revolution: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
In an interview with the Washington Post in July 2015, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley dismissed Bernie Sanders as a “protest candidate.” “I’m not running for protest candidate, I’m running for President of the United States,” O’Malley declared. But after receiving 0.57 percent of the vote in the Iowa Caucus on February 2, O’Malley dropped out, while Sanders, who tied Clinton in Iowa, moved on to New Hampshire, where he won the primary easily and established himself as a viable contender for the nomination.

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But his support is also proportional to age, and annual income rises with age, so the fact that Trump’s supporters have a slightly above average income probably reflects their age rather than their social class.
77“that are angry”: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-reince-priebus/. On Sanders’s life story, see John B. Judis, “The Bern Supremacy,” National Journal, November 19, 2015; Harry Jaffe, Why Bernie Sanders Matters, Regan Arts, 2015; Tim Murphy, “How Bernie Sanders Learned to Be a Real Politician,” Mother Jones, May 26, 2015; and Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “I’m Right and Everybody Else Is Wrong,” National Journal, June 2014.
79“nobody in the audience fainted”: Sanders, “Fragments of a Campaign Diary,” Seven Days, December 1, 1972.
79“Why Socialism”: Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism,” Monthly Review, May 1949.
79“I don’t have the power to nationalize the banks”: Baltimore Sun, December 23, 1981.
79“I’m a democratic socialist”: Sanders with Huck Gutman, Outsider in the House, Verso, 1997, p. 29.
80higher standard of living: Michael Powell, “Exceedingly Social, but Doesn’t Like Parties,” Washington Post, November 5, 2006.
80“two percent of the people”: Saint Albans Daily Messenger, December 23, 1971.
81“buy the United States Congress”: “The Rachel Maddow Show,” MSNBC, April 15, 2015.
81“What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics:” Jonathan Chait, “What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics,” New York, January 27, 2016.
81“facile calls for revolution:” “It Was Better to Bern Out,” The New York Times, June 10, 2016.
82“eat out the heart of the republic”: George E.

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No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by
Naomi Klein

And there are also military and surveillance contractors and paid lobbyists who make up a staggering number of Trump’s defense and Homeland Security appointments.
We Were on a Roll
It can be easy to forget, but before Trump’s election upset, regular people were standing up to battle injustices represented by many of these very industries and political forces, and they were starting to win. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly powerful presidential campaign, though ultimately unsuccessful, had Wall Street fearing for its bonuses and had won significant changes to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name were forcing a national debate about systemic anti-Black racism and militarized policing, and had helped win a phase-out of private prisons and reductions in the number of incarcerated Americans.

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The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by
Steve Richards

Given that the build-up to the election in the US was so similar to the Brexit campaign, the result was always going to be the same, too: victory for those on the outside. Yet each time the pattern is confirmed, we are amazed once again.
Trump’s victory was much the biggest contribution to the contours taking shape across large parts of the democratic world, but his triumph is the latest in a line of unorthodox developments. In the US, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton an unexpected fright from the left, in the battle for the Democrats’ nomination, a shock that stirred her into being a little less cautious. He partially forced her to break free of self-imposed chains, but not in a way that liberated her from a perception that she was part of an elite which had failed to deliver. Clinton’s policy agenda was more radical than many left-of-centre proposed programmes, but few people chose to notice.

…

They spend all their time telling us what they would do with the levers. Some propose economic policies that are rooted in an analysis framed by the 2008 financial crisis. Respected economists are often part of their entourages. Quite often, in their radical distinctiveness, they bring the cautious mainstream left to a semblance of political life. Hillary Clinton might have lost the US presidential campaign more decisively, if Bernie Sanders had not forced her to become a little more daring. And the UK’s Labour Party risked dying of boredom, before Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy in 2015 brought a soporific leadership contest to life. In Greece and Spain mainstream left parties were languishing, before movements to the left of them forced a rethink of sorts.
While they spark distinctively, the left-wing outsiders have one significant connection with the right-wing alternative: not only do they speak of the levers they will pull to transform the lives of voters, but they imply a power to act unilaterally that does not exist any more.

…

Although they are not free to be wholly authentic, their calculations are different, as they seek to climb the mountainous hurdles towards the White House. How do I win the party’s nomination? How do I win the presidential election? They are towering questions, but are less bound by the disciplines of holding together a party in non-presidential democracies.
In 2016 the US staged its first presidential election campaign that was shaped by outsiders. One of the candidates for the Democrats’ nomination, Bernie Sanders, opened the year with a series of TV interviews in which he outlined a programme that was well to the left of any Democrat candidate since John McGovern in 1972 and, in terms of economic policy, more radical than even McGovern’s progressive proposals. Echoing Corbyn, Tsipras and the Podemos leadership, Sanders’ overwhelming theme was that since the financial crash there had been a huge bailout for Wall Street.

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Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by
Stephen D. King

Elsewhere, parties have either emerged from nowhere or chased electability from the political fringes – Podemos, Ciudadanos and the Junts pel Sí Catalonian separatists in Spain, Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy, the Finns Party, the Hungarian Jobbik party, the Dutch Party for Freedom and the French Front National. Meanwhile, in 2016, having won the Republican presidential nomination on an anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican platform, Donald Trump was eventually propelled, seemingly against the odds, all the way to the White House. And, for the Democrats, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money by appealing to younger voters with an offer of free college places to be funded by heavy taxes on the rich, alongside considerable opposition to free trade.
In effect, the financial crisis uncovered an inherent paradox in the structure of late twentieth-century Western societies. Nation states, led by the US (and, in Europe, Germany), were the bedrock on which were built the institutions that governed globalization – the IMF, the World Trade Organization and the European Union.

…

For an intelligent man, it was a particularly stupid thing to say – unless, of course, he fully intended to whip up levels of mistrust to an even higher level.
In the 2016 US presidential contest, the choice ultimately came down to an increasingly grudging supporter of globalization – Hillary Clinton – and those who had always favoured an isolationist approach. Donald Trump, channelling one version of isolationism, adopted a protectionist manifesto, whilst Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s rival Democrat, was openly against globalization and its linkages with the ‘elite’. Throughout the campaign – and doubtless a reason behind her eventual defeat – Clinton struggled to convince people that she understood their concerns. An email scandal didn’t help, and nor did her many speeches to Wall Street bankers. And at her April 2016 victory speech at the New York primary – which covered topics ranging from job creation and inequality through to retirement prospects for America’s boomers – she wore a $12,495 Giorgio Armani jacket.

…

POPULISTS AND RENEGADES
Some argue that the problem represents no more than a growing divide between the traditional right and left. Yet a simple ‘right/left’ narrative does not work terribly well. Those on the left argue that the right thrives by exploiting divisions in society, yet the left itself is divided between those who support globalization (Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair) and those who do not (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn).2 Meanwhile, those on the right too often misinterpret economic arguments in order to push their ‘free-market’ agendas. Ricardian comparative advantage, for example, works a lot less well in the modern era: contemporary globalization is driven more by the heightened cross-border movement of capital and labour than by trade flows. By failing to recognize this distinction, the right too often ends up inadvertently supporting the interests of oligopolistic multinationals – what might loosely be described as ‘big business’ – at the expense of the population at large.

He designed a campaign around the idea that government shouldn’t penalize you for dying. (Of course, the tax burden falls on the living heir, not the decedent, but those who campaign against the “death tax” ignore this nuance.) Supporters of the tax have come up with politically charged labels of their own; they call the estate tax the “lucky rich kids’ tax” or the “Paris Hilton tax”; in his stump speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Democratic contender Bernie Sanders used to remind his audiences that “Paris Hilton never built a hotel.”
Under George W. Bush, opponents of the “death tax” won a temporary victory. Bush’s 2001 tax-reform plan phased out the estate tax over the following decade so that the rate fell to zero in the year 2010. For budget reasons, though, the death of the “death tax” was short-lived; the zero rate lasted only one year. This led to anecdotes (none proven, so far) about financial advisers’ telling their rich clients, “If you’re going to die anyway, it would make fiscal sense to do it in 2010.”

…

For decades, economists and politicians from left and right have attacked the carried-interest rule as a distortion of the basic capital gains proposition. “Why should someone who does not put any of their own money at risk pay the lower tax rate that Congress intended to reward those who do win such risky bets?” argues the business professor Peter Cohan, himself a former hedge fund manager. In the 2016 presidential campaign, politicians from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on the left to Donald Trump and Jeb Bush on the right called for termination of this loophole. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”13
One smart line of investment that the hedge fund guys make every year is their contribution to members of Congress. The politicians, in turn, serve their funders by protecting the carried-interest preference from all challengers.

…

Yes, your corner drugstore would like to take your co-pay, bill your Medicare policy, and then pay its taxes in Switzerland,” Lewis wrote. Under withering attacks from politicians, the press, and its customers, Walgreens had second thoughts and announced that it would retain its corporate presence in the United States.
—
ALL OF THE FIRMS cited here, and countless others, have been attacked by critics ranging from Bernie Sanders to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. They have been called “corporate traitors” and “Benedict Arnold companies” for shifting their tax burden out of the United States. They’ve been called outlaws and criminals for setting up such intricate structures to get around the tax code. In response to this calumny, the corporations reply that they are engaged in perfectly legal activity. They “minimize” their tax bills; they “avoid” paying taxes; but they do not “evade” taxes, because that would be against the law.

But the vast majority of the important decisions and incentives were not dependent on hierarchical state control or market forces. The prize-backed challenges of the eighteenth century were tremendous engines of progress, but those engines were not powered by kings or captains of industry. They were fueled, instead, by peer networks.
—
The premiums of the RSA are experiencing a remarkable revival in the digital age. In May 2011, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced two bills in the Senate: for the Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act and for the Prize Fund for HIV/AIDS Act. Like the Longitude Prize, the bills proposed by Sanders target a specific problem with vast economic and personal implications, namely, the cost of creating breakthrough pharmaceutical drugs. The problem is an old and vexing one: because new drugs are staggeringly expensive to develop, we have decided as a society to grant Big Pharma patents on those drugs that allow them to sell their innovations without “generic” competition for a period of roughly ten years.

…

The bills also carve out additional prize money for intermediary tools and practices that widen the diversity and density of the research network. Each year, billions of dollars would be available to institutions that release their findings into the public domain, or at least grant royalty-free open access to their patented material. The Sanders bills set incentives that reward not just finished products but also the processes that lead to breakthrough ideas. They make open collaboration pay.
—
Bernie Sanders’s colleagues in the Senate may not be ready to grasp the creative value of prize-backed challenges, but RSA-style premiums are proliferating throughout the government, on both the federal and the local level. Software-based competitions—such as Apps for America or New York City’s BigApps competition—reward programmers and information architects who create useful applications that share or explain the vast trove of government data.

…

In effect, the prize-backed challenge approach greatly increased the productivity of the taxpayer dollars spent: by promoting change in school districts that ultimately didn’t receive a dime of new funding, and through the free publicity generated by the competition itself. The $5 billion was slightly more than 1 percent of the overall education budget, yet Race to the Top has generated far more attention than any other Obama education initiative to date.
Like Bernie Sanders’s medical-innovation bills, Race to the Top was an attempt to create market-style rewards and competition in an environment that was far removed from the traditional selection pressures of capitalism. While the federal government served as the ultimate judge of the competition (effectively playing the role of the consumer in a traditional marketplace), both the problems and the proposed solutions emerged from the wider network of state and local school systems.

It took more than two weeks for authorities to determine that he was at a hospital in Tampa being treated for third-degree burns to his back, chest, and arms.
In most other communities, a disaster of that magnitude would have sparked demands for immediate improvements in zoning laws. But it changed absolutely nothing in Immokalee, where one-quarter of the residences are substandard, according to county housing officials. After touring Immokalee in 2008, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described the housing conditions there as “deplorable” and said that the shacks and trailers would never have passed a safety inspection in Burlington, the small Vermont city where he had once been mayor. To give them credit, community leaders who want to improve housing in Immokalee find themselves in a catch-22. Field workers need places to live. The sort of aggressive enforcement of building codes needed to bring the housing in Immokalee up to standard would dump hundreds of workers on the streets.

…

In 2007 and 2008, a writer who went by the Internet pseudonym surfxaholic36 frequently attached ungrammatical but scathing comments to articles, blog postings, and YouTube videos mentioning the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. A typical one read, “The CIW is an attack organization lining the leaders pockets… They make up issues and collect money from dupes that believe their story To bad the people protesting don’t have a clue regarding the facts. A bunch of fools!” In a reply to a story in the Naples News that covered a visit to Immokalee by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), surfxaholic36 wrote: “The CIW is an attack organization and will drive business out of Immokalee while they line their own pockets. They make money through donations by attacking large companies and have attacked Yum, McDonald’s and now Burger King to get money for there own organization. They are the lowest form of life exploiting the poor workers to line there own pockets. I will buy all the Whoppers I can, good going Burger King for uncovering these blood suckers.”

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“You can imagine yourself trying to make an honest presentation of how we saw the issues, when the rest of the table knew for sure that I was the devil incarnate, including the senators, all Democrats. There was not a friend in that hearing room. It was no good to be falsely accused and so defamed as an industry for something that we weren’t doing. But Senate hearings are an art—almost like bull baiting.”
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) presided over the hearing. Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) were also present. All of them had reputations for being vehemently prolabor. In their opening statements, the senators focused on wages, honing in on two claims that the Tomato Exchange had made. The first, which appeared on its Web site and was later repeated by Reggie Brown at the hearing, was that the wages paid to tomato pickers averaged over twelve dollars an hour.

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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by
Tyler Cowen

These individuals tend to be tolerant, liberal in the broad sense of that word, and often quite munificent and generous. They fit the standard description of cosmopolitan and usually take an interest in the cultures of other countries, though, ironically, many of them have become sufficiently insulated from hardship and painful change that they are provincial in their own way and have become somewhat of a political target (from both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the recent campaigns). Because they are intelligent, articulate, and often socially graceful, they usually seem like very nice people, and often they are. Think of a financier or lawyer who vacations in France or Italy, has wonderful kids, and donates generously to his or her alma mater. I think of these people as the wealthiest and best educated 3 to 5 percent of the American population.
2.

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The underlying constitutional issues have yet to be adjudicated, but the on-the-ground reality is that Brookfield Properties and the City of New York ended up getting their way. Eventually the weather became colder, and Occupy Wall Street is now a kind of misty nostalgic footnote to history. If the ideas of that movement do take off, it likely will be through the educated and quite peaceful supporters of candidates like Bernie Sanders, not through public violence.12
Or consider the 2004 Democratic National Convention. As you might expect, there were numerous would-be demonstrators. They ended up being confined to a “Demonstration Zone,” which one federal judge described as analogous to one of Piranesi’s etchings of a prison. The zone was ringed by barricades, fences, and coiled razor wire. The demonstrators in the zone had no access to the delegates and no real ability to pass out materials, and no large signs were permitted in the area.

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Good matches are lots of fun, but in a country with so much social stagnation and extremely good matching, eventually we become aware that we too are most of the time being turned away at the gate.
8.
POLITICAL STAGNATION, THE DWINDLING OF TRUE DEMOCRACY, AND ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AS PROPHET OF OUR TIME
Anti-establishment insurgent campaigns were the talk of the 2016 presidential campaign, and both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were legitimate anti-establishment candidates. But a peek beneath the surface reveals that much of the fear and anger that drove their campaigns was based not on a hope for change in Washington but on a hope for a return to the past. Trump’s rhetoric about “making America great again” was, when you looked at the fine print, mostly a promise that in electing him, voters could avoid the forces of change that are sweeping over the rest of the world, whether it be the loss of manufacturing jobs, an increasing dependence on immigrants, or the loss of the political and cultural dominance of white men.

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Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by
Jamie Bartlett

Geert Wilders, ‘Let the Dutch vote on immigration policy’, New York Times, 19 November 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/opinion/geert-wilders-the-dutch-deserve-to-vote-on-immigration-policy.html.
Capitalist Donald Trump wants to ‘declare independence from the elites’. Arch-socialist and Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders, thinks Americans are ‘sick and tired of establishment politics and economics’. Daniel Marans, ‘Sanders calls out MSNBC’s corporate ownership—in Interview on MSNBC’, Huffington Post, 7 May 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-asks-who-owns-msnbc_us_572e3d0fe4b0bc9cb0471df1.
4. Ingrid van Biezen, Peter Mair and Thomas Poguntke, ‘Going, going… gone? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe’, European Journal of Political Research 51:1 (2012), pp. 24–56. By 2012, with membership falling all the time, 82 per cent of UK citizens said they ‘tend not to trust’ political parties.

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In our busy lives, we will pay attention to the one person making more noise than anyone else, we only have time to click on that funny thing at the top of our feeds, or the thing our friends—who think like us—have posted.
It’s not the slow, informed and careful politicians who have thrived online; it’s the populists from across the spectrum. It’s the people with the simple, emotional, shareable messages. It’s people like Beppe.
Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, who’s compared the Qu’ran to Mein Kampf, is the most followed politician on the Dutch social networks. Bernie Sanders was propelled to within an inch of the Democratic Party nomination with help from his online #feelthebern fans and online donations. But the biggest shock of all (to pollsters and mainstream newspapers anyway) took place in 2016 when billionaire magnate, ur-populist, professional simplifier and Twitter addict Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States. This should not have surprised anyone.

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Most reached for the 1930s—naturally, since that after all is the only history most of us are taught in schools—and duly noted the similarities: a period of extreme economic difficulties, rising nationalism and the collapse of the moderate centre.
This account implies that right-wing populism—nationalism, xenophobia and anti-elitism—is irrevocably on the march. But there are many other types of radical ideas and movements also on the move. Trump surprised almost every seasoned Washington watcher, but so did openly socialist Bernie Sanders’ close run for the Democratic Party candidacy. Jeremy Corbyn was also re-elected as leader of the UK Labour Party, promising democratic revolution and a strong left-wing agenda. In Spain the left-wing anti-austerity Podemos party, founded in January 2014 by a long-haired bearded professor, won 21 per cent of the vote in the year’s national elections, effectively ending the two-party system.

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The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by
Ann Pettifor

There is only taxpayers’ money.1
Today this assertion sits strangely with the facts of the recent bailout of the global banking system. While politicians try to persuade electorates that ‘there is no money’, something quite different happened under the guise of quantitative easing. Central bankers created trillions of dollars ‘out of thin air’ and did so essentially overnight to bail out the banking system.
And I mean trillions.
The American senator Bernie Sanders directed the US Government Accountability Office to undertake an audit of the amount of ‘state money’ created by the US Federal Reserve and supported by governments during the crisis. The conclusion was that $16 trillion ‘in total financial assistance’ had been mobilised for ‘some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world’.2 Please note that not a cent of these trillions of dollars was raised by taxing Americans, although the liquidity created by the Federal Reserve is backed by US taxpayers.

…

Yet, of course, the retrenchment resolves nothing – in Europe, in Japan, or in the US. Private and public debts accumulate, and deflationary forces bear down on advanced economies.
In these contemporary contexts, emerging authoritarianism is rationalized by many as reflecting the weakness and ineptitude of western democracy in the wake of this terrible crisis. With the exception of campaigns like that of US Senator Bernie Sanders’ bid for the US presidency in 2016, the immensity of the power of the finance sector – Wall Street the City of London – has not been contested to any material extent by either the wider Left, social democratic parties, or indeed even by the reactionary forces in society.
Keynes today
The power of Keynes’s ideas is of a scale that has no precedent. The associated threat to vested, financial interests is obvious.

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Laura Bear, “Capital and Time: Uncertainty and Qualitative Measures of Inequality,” British Journal of Sociology vol. 65 no. 4 (2014): 639–649; Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2015).
12. Jim Tankersley, “The Thing Bernie Sanders Says about Inequality that No Other Candidate Will Touch,” Washington Post, July 13, 2015, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/13/what-bernie-sanders-is-willing-to-sacrifice-for-a-more-equal-society/, accessed July 17, 2015.
13. Leslie McCall, The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity and Redistribution (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 48.
14. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, xi–xxiv, 383.
15.

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Historian Steven Fraser’s Age of Acquiescence (2015) compared the modern American public unfavorably with Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were not afraid to call out class warfare against the working poor when they saw it.11 Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All (2013) reached a wide audience, with an accessible message: the prosperity of the United States hinges on the middle class having an income to spend. After all, a multimillionaire can only drive one car at a time, wear one change of clothing at a time, sleep on one or two pillows at a time. Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders made economic inequality one of the cornerstones of his unexpectedly popular campaign: “Unchecked growth—especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent—is absurd … Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for our people.” Sanders mentioned free college tuition and single-payer health care as important initiatives in this regard.12
At the same time that Americans seem to be grasping for answers to the problem of inequality, the history of American beliefs about, and policies toward, inequality remains understudied.13 In one of the few exceptions to this rule, Securing the Fruits of Labor (1998), James L.

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Others issued a vague call for tax restructuring, or job growth through the formation of local cooperative movements using environmentally sustainable practices.41 English professor and Occupy participant Stephen Collis advocated expansion of public transit and free education and health care.42 Some form of reviving collective bargaining, although perhaps not through a traditional union movement, was also suggested.43 A slow movement overly focused on democratic process at the best of times, Occupy was open to being portrayed by the press as increasingly dirty, dangerous, unfocused, or even Marxist and laughable.44 The Occupiers were so enamored of direct democracy that they celebrated divisions within the movement rather than making progress toward some common goal.45 Nonetheless, the Occupy movement brought sustained public attention to the issue of inequality and the degree to which American politics had been captured by the wealthiest 1 percent. Awareness of the issue among young people arguably fueled Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s popularity during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.
DISSATISFACTION WITH THE STATUS QUO: THE TEA PARTY
A right-wing protest movement emerged a year before the Occupy movement. It was, in its own way, also a protest movement against inequality, but it defined the major issues differently. In 2009, Consumer News and Business Channel commentator Rick Santelli called for a “Tea Party” to resist the Obama administration’s continuation of the Bush administration bank bailout.

Partisanship pop quiz time.75 See if you can identify the bleeding-heart liberal who said this: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Noam Chomsky? Michael Moore? Bernie Sanders?
No, it was that unrepentant lefty five-star general Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953, just a few months after taking office—a time when the economy was booming and unemployment was at 2.7 percent.76 Yet today, while America’s economy sputters down the road to recovery and the middle class struggles to make ends meet—with more than twenty-six million people unemployed or underemployed and record numbers of homes being lost to foreclosure—the “guns versus butter” argument isn’t even part of the national debate.77 Of course, today, the argument might be more accurately framed as “ICBM nukes, predator drones, and missile-defense shields versus jobs, affordable college, decent schools, foreclosure prevention, and fixing the gaping holes in our social safety net.”

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However soul sapping it may be, you have to read all the stuff that comes from your credit card company—including the small print about service fees on top of late fees on top of “inactivity” fees. If you can, set up automatic bill pay so you don’t miss a payment. Because fees account for 39 percent of credit card issuers’ revenue, the banks will keep dreaming up new ways to trick us that are not covered, or even contemplated, by existing laws.65
And the new law doesn’t prevent banks from gouging their credit card customers with sky-high interest rates.66 Senator Bernie Sanders, whose attempts at capping credit card interest rates have been voted down by his colleagues, says, “When banks are charging thirty percent interest rates, they are not making credit available.67 They are engaged in loan sharking”—also known as usury.
Throughout history, usury has been decried by writers, philosophers, and religious leaders. Aristotle called usury the “sordid love of gain” and a “sordid trade.”68 Thomas Aquinas said it was “contrary to justice.”69 In The Divine Comedy, Dante assigned usurers to the seventh circle of hell.70 Deuteronomy 23:19 says, “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother.”

The Times piece cited Schweizer’s still-unpublished book as a source of its reporting, puzzling many readers and prompting a reaction from the paper’s ombudswoman, Margaret Sullivan, who grudgingly concluded, while acknowledging that no ethical standards were breached, “I still don’t like the way it looked.”
The effect on Clinton’s popularity was profound: the percentage of Americans who thought she was “untrustworthy” shot up into the 60s. Worse for Clinton was that the Democratic primary offered an attractive alternative. Bernie Sanders was an anti–Wall Street, good-government populist whose liberal purity put Clinton’s ethical shortcomings into sharp relief.
For Bannon, the Clinton Cash uproar validated his personal theory about how conservatives had overreached the last time a Clinton was in the White House and what they should do differently. “Back then,” he says, “they couldn’t take down Bill because they didn’t do that much real reporting, they couldn’t get the mainstream guys interested, and they were always gunning for impeachment no matter what.

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“They’ve adapted into a higher species,” said Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House staffer and hardened veteran of the partisan wars of the nineties. “But these guys always blow themselves up in the end.”
Bannon disagreed, and, as always, had a historical analogy to explain why. What he was really pursuing was something like the old Marxist dialectical concept of “heightening the contradictions,” only rather than foment revolution among the proletariat, he was trying to disillusion Clinton’s natural base of support. Bernie Sanders’s unexpected strength suggested to him that it was working. He was sure that Sanders’s rise was destined to end in crashing disappointment. Having thrilled to his populist purity, his supporters would never reconcile themselves to Clinton, because the donors featured in Clinton Cash violated just about every ideal liberals hold dear. “You look at what they’ve done in the Colombian rain forest, look at the arms merchants, the war lords, the human trafficking—if you take anything that the left professes to be a cornerstone value, the Clintons have basically played them for fools,” Bannon said.

…

Now Trump had shattered that illusion, and the wave that had swept across Europe and Great Britain had come crashing down on America’s shores. “Trump,” Bannon proclaimed, “is the leader of a populist uprising. . . . What Trump represents is a restoration—a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.” Bernie Sanders had tried to warn them, but the Democrats hadn’t listened and didn’t break free of crony capitalism. “Trump saw this,” Bannon said. “The American people saw this. And they have risen up to smash it.”
For all his early-morning bravado, Bannon sounded as if he still couldn’t quite believe it all. And what an incredible story it was. Given the central role he had played in the greatest political upset in American history, the reporter suggested that it had all the makings of a Hollywood movie.

When Republican Senator Frank Murkowski became governor of Alaska, he appointed his daughter as his Senate replacement. Republican Representative Richard Pombo might be the worst recent offender in the country; he used his office to funnel money to all sorts of family and friends. Not to pick only on Republicans, Democratic Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson awarded thousands of dollars in college scholarships to four of her relatives and two of her top aide's children.Even Bernie Sanders has paid family from campaign donations, and he's a socialist.
It's not all big government, either. One study of Detroit libraries found that one in six staffers had a relative who also worked in the library system. And Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was sued in 2011 by shareholders for nepotism when it bought his daughter's company.
(11) Many states have policies about this.
Chapter 12
(1) One.Tel in Australia was an example of this.

…

The second is to decrease the cost of building a hierarchical organization of organizations. Technology aids in both of those: travel technology to allow people to move around, communications technology to allow better coordination and cooperation, and information technology to allow information to move around the organization. The fact that all of these technologies have vastly improved in the past few decades is why organizations are growing in size.
(17) Senator Bernie Sanders actually had a reasonable point when he said that any company that is too big to fail is also too big to exist.
(18) The people who use sites like Google and Facebook are not those companies’ customers. They are the products that those companies sell to their customers. In general: if you're not paying for it, then you're the product. Sometimes you're the product even if you are paying for it.

Then governments continue just as before, blithely making claims about growth, the number of jobs or ‘balancing books’, blaming their predecessors, disputing the statistics or just ignoring the findings. If protests erupt, a blast of condemnation comes from defenders of the status quo, dismissing the victims or protestors as lazy, irresponsible and inadequate.
As ever more evidence on the deleterious impact of inequality is produced, we are in danger of becoming immune to the shock. When Bernie Sanders started to gain support in the US presidential primaries by focusing on inequality, Hillary Clinton dismissed him as a ‘one-issue’ candidate. Yet establishment politicians have done nothing about it, instead aligning with financial institutions that are at the heart of the problem. As Sanders reminded his audiences, Clinton had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Goldman Sachs just for speaking.

…

From 2008 to 2012, $4.6 trillion was spent in bailing out nearly 1,000 banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions, while guarantees from the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other agencies totalled $16.9 trillion. Europe followed. In 2012–13, the ECB lent €1 trillion to Eurozone banks to avert a funding crisis. At its peak, UK government support to prop up ailing banks totalled £133 billion in cash and £1 trillion in guarantees and indemnities.
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who campaigned for the presidential nomination in 2016, listed twenty profitable corporations that had received taxpayer bailouts while operating subsidiaries in tax havens to avoid taxes and even receiving tax rebates. Bank of America received $1.9 billion as a tax refund in 2010, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits. During the crisis, it received a $45 billion bailout and $1.3 trillion in near-zero-interest loans.

…

This is a necessary condition for re-inventing the future and giving people hope of a Good Society that transcends endless consumerism and pervasive insecurity.
Disaffection with old parties is shown by the steady decline in voting, especially by youth and the precariat in general. Over a third of the US electorate does not vote in presidential elections, and in most democracies winning parties have been gaining little more than a third of the votes cast. When even flawed but well-meaning options become available, such as Bernie Sanders in the USA, a surge of enthusiasm occurs. Timid establishment types will not succeed, but bolder souls should take heart. Energies can be turned into re-engagement.
RIGHTS AS DEMANDS
‘They don’t call it class warfare until we fight back.’
Occupy Wall Street poster
Rights always begin as class-based demands, made against the state. They succeed in becoming rights when a sufficiently strong and committed mass of people with like-minded concerns and interests force the state to accede to them.

“It is common for staﬀers to get
more and better information from blogs, and for hearings
to be driven by the conversation online, than from the
Congressional liaison group at the Fed.”19 Ultimately activists
ranging from followers of libertarian Ron Paul on the right to
supporters of Grayson and Senator Bernie Sanders on the left
also succeeded in 2010 in forcing Congress to adopt a new
law requiring the Federal Reserve to detail all the recipients of
bailout funding during the banking crisis.
82
MICAH L. SIFRY
That last victory was substantial. The Wall Street Journal
editorial page praised the results of the Federal Reserve’s new
transparency, writing:
Lender of last resort indeed. The Federal Reserve pulled back the
curtain yesterday on its emergency lending during the ﬁnancial panic
of 2008 and 2009, and the game to play at home with the kids is:
who didn’t get a bailout? If you can ﬁnd a big ﬁnancial player who
declined the Fed’s cash, you’re doing better than we did yesterday
afternoon.
The documents aren’t another WikiLeaks dump but are due to
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who insisted that the Dodd-Frank
ﬁnancial bill require more transparency about how the Fed allocated
capital during the panic.

pages: 181words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by
Vivek Wadhwa,
Alex Salkever

All of us have a role in deciding where the lines should be drawn.
At the end of the day, you will realize that I am an optimistic at heart. I sincerely believe that we will all learn, evolve, and come together as a species and do amazing things.
With that, let the journey begin.
PART ONE
The Here and Now
1
A Bitter Taste of Dystopia
The 2016 presidential campaign made everybody angry. Liberal Bernie Sanders supporters were angry at allegedly racist Republicans and a political system they perceived as being for sale, a big beneficiary being Hillary Clinton. Conservative Donald Trump supporters were furious at the decay and decline of America, and at how politicians on both sides of the aisle had abandoned them and left a trail of broken promises. Hillary Clinton supporters fumed at how the mainstream media had failed to hold Trump accountable for lewd behavior verging on sexual assault—and worse.

…

Could flinging feces at a Google-bus turn back the clock and reduce prices of housing to affordable levels?
The 2016 presidential campaign was the national equivalent of the Google-bus protests. The supporters of Donald Trump, largely white and older, wanted to turn back the clock to a pre-smartphone era when they could be confident that their lives would be more stable and their incomes steadily rising. The Bernie Sanders supporters, more liberal but also mostly white (albeit with great age diversity), wanted to turn back the clock to an era when the people, not the big corporations, controlled the government. We have seen violent protests in Paris and elsewhere against Uber drivers. What sorts of protests will we see when the Uber cars no longer have drivers and the rage is directed only at the machine itself?

pages: 198words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by
Richard V. Reeves

In his book Twilight of the Elites, the liberal broadcaster and writer Chris Hayes positions the upper middle class as losing out:
The upper middle class [are] people with graduate school degrees, homes, second homes, kids in good colleges, and six-figure incomes. This frustrated, discontented class has spent a decade with their noses pressed up against the glass, watching the winners grab more and more for themselves, seemingly at the upper middle class’s expense.9
Hayes may be right about the frustration and discontent. Much of the political energy behind both the Bernie Sanders left and the Tea Party right came from the upper middle class. But Hayes is wrong to imply that the frustration is warranted, or that the very rich are gaining “at the upper middle class’s expense.” As the 2016 election helped us to see, the real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else.
Politicians don’t help much, either.

…

But the opportunities and tools needed to lead a fully independent, “self-made” life do not appear out of thin air. They are created and destroyed in our communities, relationships, and institutions. Individual success relies on collective investments.
The individualist ethos frustrates many on the American left, but I see little sign of it losing its grip on the collective imagination. Many liberals wish America were more like Europe—and often specifically Scandinavia. Bernie Sanders, after all, was effectively the Danish candidate for president. But America’s problem is not that we are failing to live up to Danish egalitarian standards. It is that we are failing to live up to American egalitarian standards, based on fair market competition.
The main challenge is to narrow gaps in human capital formation, especially in the first two decades of life. In many cases, this means helping more children to benefit from the advantages that those in the upper middle class enjoy—stronger family formation, more engaged parenting, involvement in education, and so on.

It marked the endpoint of an electoral strategy that no longer had anything new to say. The Third Way itself had been swallowed by the void. Like David Cameron’s ill-fated Remain campaign in the UK, Clinton eventually settled on ‘Stronger Together’. But she failed to articulate why. It seemed more like a game of demographic addition than a reason to govern. Meanwhile, much of her presumed base – the college-educated millennials – had defected to Bernie Sanders. One widely shared meme crystallised their view of Mrs Clinton. It showed a fake poster comparing the two candidates on the issue of whether they would dine at Olive Garden – a soulless restaurant chain that is popular in the suburbs. ‘Only when I’m high,’ says Sanders’s caption. ‘An authentic Italian restaurant for the whole family!’ says Hillary. In the general election, the millennials stayed home in droves.

Although both were Senate Democrats, they each chaired committees that shared—and often fought over—turf when healthcare was on the agenda. So their willingness to work together was, in itself, seen by Capitol Hill insiders as a sign that the issue was gathering momentum.
Kennedy’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—called HELP—was stocked with some of the Senate’s leading liberals, including Iowa’s Tom Harkin, and Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born Vermont senator who called himself an independent but caucused with the Democrats. The Finance Committee, on the other hand, had more moderate Democrats, such as Baucus and North Dakota’s Kent Conrad.
Among the many reasons the Clinton healthcare reform push had died on Capitol Hill in 1993 was that the Finance Committee, then chaired by New York centrist Democrat Pat Moynihan, had stiff-armed Kennedy and his HELP Committee.

…

The group Kennedy’s staff assembled, mostly HELP Committee staffers and friendly healthcare reform policy advocates, were all Democrats. But they had been directed by Kennedy to come up with a package that could pass a Senate with Republican votes. Democrats had only fifty-five votes in 2008, even assuming the support of their most conservative members, plus the presumed vote of independent Bernie Sanders. Getting something through the Senate would require a sixty-vote margin to survive a filibuster.
At the same time, Fowler and her staff—pushed by Baucus in meetings that seemed to happen every other day or so—charted a more public course. As Baucus had instructed, they organized witnesses to testify at Finance Committee hearings in the late spring. Those hearings would be the lead-up to what Baucus envisioned as an unusual show of momentum and consensus: a daylong bipartisan “summit” that Baucus and his senior Republican colleague on the committee, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, would convene in June.

…

But one issue loomed that might spoil the good cheer: Kennedy had insisted that the Democrats hold open the possibility of trying to pass healthcare reform in the guise of legislation related mainly to taxes and finance. That kind of bill enabled a Senate process called budget reconciliation. Under Senate rules, budget reconciliation bills required only 51 votes, not the 60 needed to override a filibuster. The November 2008 elections had just boosted the Senate Democratic vote tally to 58 (including the independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont). Still, 58 was not 60, and two Senate Democrats, Kennedy and Robert Byrd, were now so ill they soon might not be able to get to the floor for a vote. Reconciliation was not an ideal way around a Republican roadblock because much of the envisioned healthcare reforms might not pass the financial issues–only smell test. But Kennedy and other Democrats considered it an important card to hold.

Although both were Senate Democrats, they each chaired committees that shared—and often fought over—turf when healthcare was on the agenda. So their willingness to work together was, in itself, seen by Capitol Hill insiders as a sign that the issue was gathering momentum.
Kennedy’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—called HELP—was stocked with some of the Senate’s leading liberals, including Iowa’s Tom Harkin, and Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born Vermont senator who called himself an independent but caucused with the Democrats. The Finance Committee, on the other hand, had more moderate Democrats, such as Baucus and North Dakota’s Kent Conrad.
Among the many reasons the Clinton healthcare reform push had died on Capitol Hill in 1993 was that the Finance Committee, then chaired by New York centrist Democrat Pat Moynihan, had stiff-armed Kennedy and his HELP Committee.

…

The group Kennedy’s staff assembled, mostly HELP Committee staffers and friendly healthcare reform policy advocates, were all Democrats. But they had been directed by Kennedy to come up with a package that could pass a Senate with Republican votes. Democrats had only fifty-five votes in 2008, even assuming the support of their most conservative members, plus the presumed vote of independent Bernie Sanders. Getting something through the Senate would require a sixty-vote margin to survive a filibuster.
At the same time, Fowler and her staff—pushed by Baucus in meetings that seemed to happen every other day or so—charted a more public course. As Baucus had instructed, they organized witnesses to testify at Finance Committee hearings in the late spring. Those hearings would be the lead-up to what Baucus envisioned as an unusual show of momentum and consensus: a daylong bipartisan “summit” that Baucus and his senior Republican colleague on the committee, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, would convene in June.

…

But one issue loomed that might spoil the good cheer: Kennedy had insisted that the Democrats hold open the possibility of trying to pass healthcare reform in the guise of legislation related mainly to taxes and finance. That kind of bill enabled a Senate process called budget reconciliation. Under Senate rules, budget reconciliation bills required only 51 votes, not the 60 needed to override a filibuster. The November 2008 elections had just boosted the Senate Democratic vote tally to 58 (including the independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont). Still, 58 was not 60, and two Senate Democrats, Kennedy and Robert Byrd, were now so ill they soon might not be able to get to the floor for a vote. Reconciliation was not an ideal way around a Republican roadblock because much of the envisioned healthcare reforms might not pass the financial issues–only smell test. But Kennedy and other Democrats considered it an important card to hold.

The struggles against misogyny and other forms of discrimination have rarely been undertaken with the same vigour unleashed against capitalist bosses.
It would be wrong to imply that today this dynamic has been turned on its head. One can still find sexism, racism and homophobia on the left as easily as one can find it in wider society. In an article for Slate about the US Democratic primaries, Michelle Goldberg wrote in late 2015 about a cultural phenomenon of so-called Bernie Bros – male supporters of US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who ‘seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously’.102 The sexual assault allegations that embroiled the British Socialist Workers’ Party in 2013 paints an even grimmer picture of self-proclaimed egalitarians who see no contradiction in using their power as men to belittle and abuse women. In this wretched incident, despite serious allegations of sexual assault being made against a senior party member of the SWP – ‘Comrade Delta’ – the female accusers were discouraged from going to the police on the basis that socialists should have ‘no faith in the bourgeois court system to deliver justice’.103
Again, rudimentary women’s rights had to wait until the victory of the glorious revolution.

Boards of directors are allowed to work together, and so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate.
Corporate welfare
In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the only Independent member of Congress, wrote, “If we’re serious about balancing the budget in a fair way, we must slash corporate welfare.” You’ve said you’re very uncomfortable with the term corporate welfare. Why?
I like Bernie Sanders, and that was a good column, but I think he starts off on the wrong foot. Why should we balance the budget? Do you know a business—or a household—that doesn’t have any debt?
I don’t think we should balance the budget at all. The whole idea is just another weapon against social programs and in favor of the rich—in this case, mostly financial institutions, bondholders and the like.

…

See also India
Bermuda
Bernard, Elaine
Bernstein, Dennis
“bewildered herd,”
Bible, intellectuals in
biblical prophecies
biotechnology
birth control
bishops’ conferences
Bitter Paradise
black market in India
blacks, US. See racism
Blowback
BMW
B’nai B’rith (Anti-Defamation League)
Boeing
Bolivia
Bolshevik coup
Bolshevism
Bombay slums. See also India
book publishing
Bosch
Bosnia
Boston
Boston City Hospital
Boston Globe
Bernie Sanders op-ed in
on East Timor
May Day headline in
Schanberg op-ed in
on semiconductors
on Vietnam War
Boulder (CO)
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros
Boyer, Paul
Bradley Foundation
Brady, Robert
brainwashing at home
Brazil
brutal army of
capital flight from
“economic miracle” in
economy fine, people not
favelas
films in Nova Igauçu (Rio favela)
foreign debt of
IMF impact on
independent media in
Landless Workers’ Movement
left journal in
loans made to
media in
military coup in
more open-minded than US
racism in
rich out of control in
rural workers in
US domination of
Workers’ Party
breast cancer
Bretton Woods system
Bridge of Courage
Brière, Elaine
British
East India Company
Egypt invaded by
in India
in Ireland
in Israel
merchant-warriors
opium trafficking by
British, continued
protectionism
British Columbia
Brown, Ron
Bryant, Adam
Buchanan, Pat
budget, balancing the federal
Buenos Aires
“buffer zone,”
Bundy, McGeorge
bureaucrats, pointy-headed
Burma
Burnham, Walter Dean
Burundi
Bush administration
attitude toward biotechnology
Baker Plan
Gulf war during
Haiti policies of
human rights abuses during
Joya Martinez silenced by
National Security Policy Review of
Panama invasion during
pro-Israel bias of
protectionist policies
reliance on force by
unemployment during
war on drugs by
Bush, George
antisemitic remarks by
Bosnia and Somalia compared by
“Bou-Bou Ghali” mistake
Japan visit by
“linkage” opposed by
“new world order,”
OSHA weakened by
personality type of
Somalia and
“what we say goes,”
business.

But if they are pressed, their instinct would likely be to agree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher, who once said that “finance” is “a slave’s word,” while the profession itself is nothing more than “a means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block.” The modern-day equivalent of this sentiment can be found in the musings of Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont and former Democratic presidential candidate, whose stump speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign condemned Wall Street relentlessly. “Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today,” he said in January 2016. And then he paid homage to one of the most recognizable cultural touchstones about modern Wall Street when he referred to the famous “Greed is good” scene in Wall Street, the 1987 Oliver Stone film, where Gordon Gekko, played with oleaginous glee by Michael Douglas, lectures Bud Fox, his young and aspiring apprentice (played by Charlie Sheen).

Those in the club, where membership requires access to billions of dollars of collateral, share snippets of gossip about who is betting prices will rise or fall. But for those outside, information can be tough to come by. This veil of secrecy has fallen only one time, and the snapshot of the investors and traders setting energy prices in the summer of 2008 showed that McClendon and several close associates were among the largest participants.
US Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, pulled the curtain back when he released a confidential list of futures market speculators compiled by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a disclosure that sent futures traders into conniptions. The list of who held the natural gas contracts was a who’s who of global capitalism and energy. In descending order, they were BP, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Shell.

…

For more information about Arnold, see “The Reckoning of Centaurus Billionaire John Arnold,” by Leah McGrath Goodman in the February 1, 2011, edition of Absolute Return.
Some of McClendon’s quotes about Chesapeake having four main inputs and the number of leasing transactions come from an interview he gave on January 5, 2012, to my Wall Street Journal colleagues Daniel Gilbert and Ryan Dezember.
Senator Bernie Sanders, in August 2011, released a snapshot of participants in natural gas and oil futures markets. The information was made available on his Senate website, www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=e802998a-8ee2-4808-9649-0d9730b75ea4. (Last accessed August 2013.) I downloaded the data, put it into spreadsheets, and analyzed it to come up with the rankings of largest natural gas market participants.

pages: 479words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America
by
Danielle Dimartino Booth

But had the predominantly liberal Fed leadership not facilitated the bad behavior of the elite by encouraging them to borrow at virtually no cost, their wealth and power would never have become as concentrated as it is today.
The ostentatiousness with which the so-called one percent has flaunted its wealth has fueled the rise of anger and extremism, leading to the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right.
And politicians wonder about the genesis of a deeply divided and dispirited populace.
Central bankers have invited politicians to abdicate their leadership authority to an inbred society of PhD academics who are infected to their core with groupthink, or as I prefer to think of it: “groupstink.”
Annual borrowing costs for the United States since 2008 have hovered around 1.8 percent, thanks to an overly accommodating Fed, which allowed a dysfunctional Congress and the administration of former President Barack Obama to kick the responsibility down the road.

…

The Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), to backstop the tri-party repo system.
And finally, the Money Market Investor Funding Facility (MMIFF).
These Fed-created facilities put a floor under the shadow banking system and finally checked the run. (These didn’t include the various programs created by the FDIC, the Treasury, or Congress.)
The loans the Fed made were secret. Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist who in 2015 launched a run for president as a Democrat, later sponsored legislation that compelled the Fed to disclose financial details of its extraordinary efforts to save Wall Street.
Released in late November 2011, the data, which covered twenty-one thousand Fed emergency loans totaling $3.3 trillion, revealed for the first time how close some of the biggest names on Wall Street came to the brink of disaster.

Opportunities suggest themselves for interesting and unusual coalitions in organizing to take on the Fed. Many grassroots libertarians are wary of the Fed, often because they view it as an instrument of Wall Street banks. Progressives can find allies among libertarians for at least some actions related to the Fed, most importantly measures that increase accountability.
In the last session of Congress, Ron Paul, one of its most conservative members, and Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders, two of its most progressive, introduced bills requiring greater disclosure of the Fed’s lending practices. Despite the opposition of the Democratic leadership, the Paul-Grayson bill won the support of the majority of the House, as most Republicans and about one-third of Democrats signed on as co-sponsors. Despite the strong opposition of the Fed, which predicted disastrous consequences if details of loan information were made public, a version of these bills was eventually attached to the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and passed into law.

A current example is the suit brought by the nursing home chain Beverly Enterprises against Cornell University labor historian Kate Bronfenbrenner, who testified on its practices at a town meeting, at the invitation of members of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation (personal communication; also Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, April 1, 1998; Deidre McFadyen, In These Times, April 5, 1998). For Beverly, the outcome is largely irrelevant, since discovery demands alone severely damage Professor Bronfenbrenner and her university, and may have a chilling effect on other researchers and educational institutions.
14. White House letter, January 20, 1998. I am indebted to congressional staffers, particularly the office of Representative Bernie Sanders.
15. Jane Bussey, “New Rules Could Guide International Investment,” Miami Herald, July 20, 1997; R.C. Longworth, “New Rules for Global Economy,” Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1997. See also Jim Simon, Seattle Times, “Environmentalists Suspicious of Foreign-Investor-Rights Plan,” Seattle Times, November 22, 1997; Lorraine Woellert, “Trade Storm Brews over Corporate Rights,” Washington Times, December 15, 1997.

Between 2003 and 2008, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, reportedly much of the $40 billion in cash sent to Iraq for the reconstruction and restructuring of government services was stolen, misappropriated, or mysteriously lost.71
It is because of these travesties that the 2011 deficit-reduction debate and the fallout over increasing the nation’s debt ceiling—which left Congress in a state of paralysis for months—were such shams. House Speaker John Boehner’s $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction plan included no cuts in Afghanistan and Iraq war spending but drastic cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that help the economically vulnerable and desperately poor.
As progressive Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argued in a blistering July 2011 Wall Street Journal editorial, the plan offered by Democrats rendered almost as much harm to the poor as Boehner’s proposal:
“The plan by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, which calls for $2.4 trillion in cuts over a 10-year period, includes $900 billion in cuts in areas such as education, health care, nutrition, affordable housing, child care, and many other programs desperately needed by working families and the most vulnerable.”

When Hillary Clinton made a run for her party’s presidential nomination in 2008, Gensler became her chief fundraiser. When she lost, he joined the Obama campaign and later became head of the president-elect’s SEC transition team.
President-elect Obama named Gensler CFTC chairman in December 2008. But the appointment was not a slam dunk. A Senate floor vote on the nomination in March 2009 was blocked by Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a socialist who most often votes with the Democrats. Senator Sanders was steamed about Gensler’s opposition to regulation of the collateralized debt securities (CDS) market all those years ago. He stated, “At this moment in our history, we need an independent leader who will help create a new culture in the financial marketplace and move us away from the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior which has caused so much harm to our economy.”

The next day, all three networks were taking turns, competing to get her on the air. The phone was ringing constantly. That’s when Lea decided to speak to the press herself.
There was a constant flow of people through our house. Letters and postcards from strangers poured into our mailbox. The Boy Scouts came by and cleaned up our yard, without anyone asking them to. Vermont’s two senators, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, called, along with our local representatives and town officials. Even Ted Kennedy left his number and asked if there was anything he could do. Everyone was extremely supportive, including a couple from the local Somali community who came by to hand-deliver a note saying they were praying for Andrea and our family.
By Thursday afternoon, all of the calls and the letters and the constant barrage of news had become overwhelming.

A key example of the enduring influence of one firm would be on display in March 2009, when Obama picked former Goldman partner Gary Gensler for the position as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the position once held by Brooksley Born, the stalwart consumer watchdog back in the Clinton years who had stood for regulation of the derivatives that would humble the world’s economy. Gensler was confirmed but only after jumping over a hurdle constructed by Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, an independent in spirit as well as party label. Sanders placed Gensler’s nomination on hold. Sounds like a minor issue to get worked up about, but the senator was right.
Gensler helped create this financial crisis when he was pushing for deregulation in the Treasury Department back in the Clinton era, when bipartisan cooperation with Wall Street lobbyists was all the rage.

Altman's task is not trivial: he will have to figure out a way to quantify the satisfaction his guinea pigs derive from their UBI, and whether they are doing anything useful with their time.[cccv]
Socialism?
With all these experiments bubbling up, the concept of UBI has become a favourite media topic, but it is controversial. Many opponents – especially in the US – see it as a form of socialism, and the US has traditionally harboured a visceral dislike of socialism. (The strong performance of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, in the race to become the Democratic Party's candidate in the 2016 Presidential election is a striking departure from this norm of US politics.)
This concern is what seemed to leave Martin Ford somewhat dispirited at the end of his book “The Rise of the Robots”. As we saw in chapter 3, he fears that “guaranteed income is likely to be disparaged as 'socialism'”, and introducing it will be a “staggering challenge”.

The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg)
by
Liam Vaughan,
Gavin Finch

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Gensler also inherited the
CFTC during the early stages of what would become one of the biggest
Escape to London
71
investigations into financial malfeasance ever undertaken by a government agency: Libor.
Not everyone backed him to do a good job. Of the 30 presidential
appointees put before the Senate that year, Gensler was the last to be
approved. His selection as head of the CFTC was blocked for months by
Democrat Maria Cantwell and independent Bernie Sanders, who questioned whether he was the right person to help “create a new culture in
the financial marketplace” after the crisis.
It wasn’t just Gensler’s background in banking that provoked skepticism. As an undersecretary to Rubin, Gensler had played a prominent
role in pushing through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of
2000, which exempted over-the-counter derivatives such as interest-rate
swaps and credit default swaps from regulation.

Or, alternatively, suppose we consult an eminent proponent of globalization analysis, Saskia Sassen, prognosticating “The End of Financial Capitalism”: “The difference of the current crisis is precisely that financialized capitalism has reached the limits of its own logic.”17 David Harvey more tentatively and cautiously asked whether it was “really” the end of neoliberalism.18 Some members of the faculty at Cambridge and Birkbeck declared, “The collapse of confidence in financial markets and the banking system . . . is currently discrediting the conventional wisdom of neo-liberalism.”19 Various politicians temporarily indulged in the same hyperbole: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia openly proclaimed the death of neoliberalism, only to succumb to his own untimely political demise at the hands of his own party; Senator Bernie Sanders prognosticated that as Wall Street collapsed, so too would the legacy of Milton Friedman. Yet, unbowed, the University of Chicago solicited $200 million in donations to erect a monument in his honor, and founded a new “Milton Friedman Institute.”20 “Wakes for Neoliberalism” were posted all about the Internet in 2008–9; a short stint on Google will provide all the Finnegan that is needed.
More elaborate analyses of the unfolding of the crisis by academics on the left followed suit.

…

Indeed, as time passes, it begins to appear that Bernanke presides over little more than a cabal of bankers using public funds to keep themselves in power and riches. Simon Johnson has highlighted the role of Jamie Dimon as benefiting tremendously from the forced and subsidized purchase of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan while he was on the Board of the New York Fed, which was orchestrating the deal. Senator Bernie Sanders has released a list of eighteen other Fed directors who received substantial funding from the Fed during the crisis.59 It appears that “saving the economy” was tantamount to flooding their own banks (and pockets) with liquidity. As more details are leaked, it appears Bernanke provides a thin veneer of academic imprimatur to what can only be regarded as a vast morass of insider dealing.
Bernanke’s Fed has not suffered from what can only be judged an intellectual imbroglio of epic proportions; this has been one of the most glaring instances of economists getting away with murder.

In America and Europe, the major political parties have been locked in backward-looking agendas developed in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal, the Cold War, civil rights movements, and the early information technology revolution. Their current coalitions and internal compromises may not be able to deal with the age of accelerations. The crack-up has already begun within the Republican Party, which, among other things, denies even the reality of climate change. But Bernie Sanders’s success in attracting many young Democrats suggests that the Democratic Party will not be immune to fracture, either. The same process is under way in Europe. The United Kingdom’s vote to withdraw from the European Union has opened deep cracks in both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and the rising challenge of immigration from the World of Disorder is stressing other long-established parties everywhere on the continent.

…

As I noted earlier, after 2007, citizens in America and so many other industrial democracies felt they were being hurtled along into the future so much faster—their workplaces were rapidly changing under their feet, social mores were rapidly changing around their ears, and globalization was throwing so many new people and ideas into their faces—but governance in places such as Washington and Brussels got either bogged down in bureaucracy or gridlocked. So no one was giving people the right diagnosis of what was happening in the world around them, and most established political parties were offering catechisms that were simply not relevant to the age of accelerations. Into this vacuum, this empty room, stepped populists with easy answers—the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders promised to make it all right by taking down “the Man,” and Donald Trump promised to make it all right by personally holding back the hurricane of change because he was “the Man.” Neither the center-left nor the center-right in America or Europe had the self-confidence required for the level of radical rethinking and political innovating demanded by the age of accelerations.
On May 16, 2016, The New York Times carried a story about a divisive Austrian election, featuring two quotes that spoke for so many voters across the industrialized world.

The Republican Party was born in the late 1850s in reaction to the inability of the existing parties to deal with the issues that led to the Civil War. But that was 150 years ago. Since then we have had dozens of attempts to breach the Democrat-Republican political duopoly. From time to time populist, socialist, and, more recently, the Green Party win local elections, and independents, such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, win election to Congress.
Nationwide, some third parties have made a difference in presidential elections. In 1912 Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party split the Republican vote and elected Woodrow Wilson. In 1992, Ross Perot drained votes from George H. W. Bush to give the election to Bill Clinton. And in 2000, Ralph Nader took enough votes away from Al Gore to trigger the events that led to the Supreme Court giving the election of George W.

Research & Development
The need for radically new and better approaches to assessment and to improved teacher preparation and professional development point to a much larger need in education today. To develop better approaches to accountability and to create laboratory schools for new approaches to learning, teacher training, and assessment, we must have a massive investment in educational R&D.
The U.S. federal budget is awash in spending on research and development. In fiscal year 2013, we spent $72 billion on military R&D. With the exception of Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul, you can’t find a politician in our country at the national level who doesn’t assert, “State-of-the art military technology is vital to our long-term national security.” As a side note, our military spending outpaces the second most aggressive nation, China, by a 4.1-to-1 ratio. The United States spends more on its military than the defense-related expenditures of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy, and Brazil combined.8
But can our leaders possibly believe that investing in military R&D is far more important than investing in R&D for educating our youth?

It was as if those at the very top simply assumed that the
government could do all these things, without ever asking whether
that assumption made any sense.
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What made this all the more weird was that the very people
who were operating upon this vision of regulatory omnipotence
were the same people who, in a million other contexts, would have
been most skeptical about the government’s ability to do anything.
We’re not talking about FDR here. Or even the socialist member
of the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders. We’re talking about
people who don’t believe the government can run a railroad. But if
a government can’t run a railroad, how is it to run a whole society?
What possible reason is there to think that we had anything like
the capacity necessary to do this?
For though many predicted resistance, the presumption behind
our government actions was that force could always quell resistance. If the enemy fought back, we’d fight harder.

Her research expertise is in Federal Reserve operations, fiscal policy, social security, international finance and employment. She is best known for her contributions to the literature on Modern Monetary Theory. Her book, The State, The Market and the Euro (Edward Elgar, 2003) predicted the debt crisis in the eurozone. She served as Chief Economist on the US Senate Budget Committee and as an economic advisor to the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. She was Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the top-ranked blog ‘New Economic Perspectives’ and a member of the TopWonks network of America's leading policy thinkers. She consults with policy-makers, investment banks and portfolio managers across the globe, and is a regular commentator on national radio and broadcast television.
L. Randall Wray is Professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute.

But he has nothing on this year’s field of candidates. Back in June, the Hillary Clinton campaign issued its official Spotify playlist, packed with on-message tunes (“Brave,” “Fighters,” “Stronger,” “Believer”). Ted Cruz live-streams his appearances on Periscope. Marco Rubio broadcasts “Snapchat Stories” along the trail. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham produce goofy YouTube videos. Even grumpy old Bernie Sanders has attracted nearly two million friends on Facebook, leading the New York Times to dub him “a king of social media.”
And then there’s Donald Trump. If Sanders is a king, Trump is a god. A natural-born troll, adept at issuing inflammatory bulletins at opportune moments, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm. In a typical tweet, sent out at dawn at the start of a recent campaign week, he described Clinton aide Huma Abedin as “a major security risk” and “the wife of perv sleazebag Anthony Wiener.”

And, in America, Donald Trump has mounted an insurgent campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency on a platform of virulent anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The nationalist right is ascendant around the rich world.
So, too, is a more radical left. This new left, however, has not yet enjoyed as much electoral success as the radical right. The hard-left Jeremy Corbyn shook the British establishment by taking control of Britain’s Labour party, but he has not been able to wrest control of the government from the Tories. Bernie Sanders, a long-time socialist senator from Vermont, mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, yet ultimately fell short of the mark. Some radical left parties have done somewhat better. The anti-austerity leftists of Greece’s Syriza party, for example, won control of parliament in early 2015 and attempted to win a reprieve from the austerity policies imposed on Greece by its European creditors (who were, in their defence, helping to finance Greece’s unaffordable debts).

“I don’t want the United States to be in a global economy,” she said, “where our economic future is bound to that of Zimbabwe.”
The fact that a goofball like Michele Bachmann has a few dumb ideas doesn’t mean much, in the scheme of things. What is meaningful is the fact that this belief in total deregulation and pure capitalism is still the political mainstream not just in the Tea Party, not even just among Republicans, but pretty much everywhere on the American political spectrum to the right of Bernie Sanders. Getting ordinary Americans to emotionally identify in this way with the political wishes of their bankers and credit card lenders and mortgagers is no small feat, but it happens—with a little help.
I’m going to say something radical about the Tea Partiers. They’re not all crazy. They’re not even always wrong.
What they are, and they don’t realize it, is an anachronism. They’re fighting a 1960s battle in a world run by twenty-first-century crooks.

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The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by
Peter Temin

Donald Trump, the candidate of the Republican Party, appealed to whites in the low-wage sector to express their frustration and despair. The poor whites were unnoticed collateral damage until this campaign, but their anger dominated meetings where Trump spoke. Violence may have been stimulated when the candidate alluded to the majority minority oxymoron and assured the audience they were better than African Americans and Latino immigrants. Bernie Sanders, an insurgent Democratic candidate, appealed to another branch of the low-wage sector, those who were trying to move into the FTE sector. As described in chapter 4, they more often did not make it and had to deal with massive student debts. Only time will tell how these attempts to wake this sleeping giant will affect America.2
The FTE sector makes plans for itself, typically ignoring the needs of the low-wage sector.

According to estimates, about 8 percent of global wealth, or $7.5 trillion, is squirreled away in tax havens, $6 trillion of which has not been taxed.16 This hidden wealth distorts the picture of inequality, which if factored in would likely be even greater.17
Approaching the Tipping Point
The situation is so egregious that even members of the establishment have begun going rogue. “Class traitors” such as George Soros, Nick Hanauer, and Paul Tudor Jones have warned of the potentially dramatic consequences of inequality and suggested measures to reduce it. Even Asher Edelman, the real-life Gordon Gekko on whom the movie Wall Street’s ruthlessly greedy protagonist was partly modeled, has turned dissident, arguing for the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders as the best option for the U.S. economy.18
The economic discontent has led to unprecedented political polarization, pitting the “have-nots” against the “haves,” the proletariat against the intellectual elite, and the young against the old. People are acutely aware of the democratic deficit resulting from the undue collusion of the financial, corporate, and political sectors, and many feel that the system has been hijacked and rigged by special interests.

pages: 437words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
by
Cass R. Sunstein

People might find the reposted articles less interesting, and if so, there are fewer clicks, making for a less attractive product. (I speculate that the third reason might be the most important.)
It is entirely reasonable for Facebook to take these points into account. But we should not aspire to a situation in which everyone’s News Feed is perfectly personalized, so that supporters of different politicians—Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, someone else—see fundamentally different stories, focusing on different topics or covering the same topics in radically different ways. Facebook seems to think that it would be liberating if every person’s News Feed could be personalized so that people see only and exactly what they want. Don’t believe it. In the 2016 presidential campaign, the News Feed spread a lot of falsehoods.

pages: 356words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by
Richard Florida

It is critical that we get this right.
10
URBANISM FOR ALL
When was the last time you heard a national politician talk thoughtfully about cities and urban policy or make them an integral part of his or her agenda? Former president Barack Obama grew up in cities and clearly cares deeply about them, but even his administration failed to make any substantial moves on urban policy. The 2016 Democratic primary featured two former mayors, Bernie Sanders from Burlington, Vermont, and Martin O’Malley from Baltimore; and a third, former Richmond mayor Tim Kaine, eventually joined the Democratic ticket as Hillary Clinton’s running mate. Aside from O’Malley’s invocations of urban policy, which I helped craft, cities and urban policy were rarely, if ever, mentioned during the 2016 primaries or presidential campaign. The last time we had a serious national conversation about cities was back in the 1960s and 1970s, during the old urban crisis, when some cities exploded in riots and others teetered on fiscal collapse.

pages: 290words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by
Leigh Gallagher

This goes even deeper: as Sebastian Junger points out in his book Tribe, we are the first modern society in human history where people live alone in apartments and where children have their own bedrooms. The gradual decline of trust in societal institutions over the years, meanwhile, from business to government, accelerated in the wake of the Great Recession, making people more receptive to a “fringe” idea than they might otherwise have been (see Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump). Add on a growing sense of unease over geopolitical risk and the sense that horrible and unpredictable things are happening in the world, and the urge to connect with others becomes an unarticulated desire in all of us. Whatever you think about “belonging,” these forces really were a large part of what made people more open to trying this new, quirky, affordable travel experience.

pages: 337words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

For a doppelganger search to be truly accurate, you don’t want to find someone who merely likes the same things you like. You also want to find someone who dislikes the things you dislike.
My interests are apparent not just from the accounts I follow but from those I choose not to follow. I am interested in sports, politics, comedy, and science but not food, fashion, or theater. My follows show that I like Bernie Sanders but not Elizabeth Warren, Sarah Silverman but not Amy Schumer, the New Yorker but not the Atlantic, my friends Noah Popp, Emily Sands, and Josh Gottlieb but not my friend Sam Asher. (Sorry, Sam. But your Twitter feed is a snooze.)
Of all 200 million people on Twitter, who has the most similar profile to me? It turns out my doppelganger is Vox writer Dylan Matthews. This was kind of a letdown, for the purposes of improving my media consumption, as I already follow Matthews on Twitter and Facebook and compulsively read his Vox posts.

“The growing array of derivatives and the related application of more sophisticated methods for measuring and managing risks had been key factors underlying the remarkable resilience of the banking system, which had recently shrugged off severe shocks to the economy and the financial system.”
Now Greenspan was turning his back on the very system he had championed for decades. In congressional testimony in 2000, Vermont representative Bernie Sanders had asked Greenspan, “Aren’t you concerned with such a growing concentration of wealth that if one of these huge institutions fails it will have a horrendous impact on the national and global economy?”
Greenspan didn’t bat an eye. “No, I’m not,” he’d replied. “I believe that the general growth in large institutions has occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically—I should say fully—hedged.”

Every Senate Democrat rejected this resolution, which would have invalidated the regulations, and from the outside, you would have concluded that the
caucus favored the principles of Internet freedom and rejected corporate profiteering of the World Wide Web. This actually represented an advance; Senate
Democrats weren’t always explicitly on board with net neutrality, and to hold
the entire caucus, from Bernie Sanders to Ben Nelson and everyone in between,
is quite a legislative feat on anything of consequence.
But at the exact same time as Senate Democrats voted down net neutrality
repeal, many of them were scheming to bring so-called anti-piracy legislation
to the floor. The two bills coming up at the same time represents a common,
devious tactic: make a big show of solidarity with a community or interest
group on one bill, while selling them out on the side.

“I thought that our employees and most importantly, our investors, needed to see me as a strong leader believing one hundred percent in what our company stood for,” he said.1
Indeed, the caution he expressed to Swanson proved fleeting. Both McClendon and Tom Ward were so bullish that by June each controlled nearly identical wagers on natural gas derivatives worth around $2.3 billion, according to trading data later disclosed by U.S. senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and later reported by Reuters. Among three hundred banks, hedge funds, energy companies, and other traders identified by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, only four held bigger gas bets than McClendon and Ward. McClendon held additional contracts on oil worth another $240 million, according to the data.2
McClendon had vowed to rein in the company’s spending, but a buzz was growing about two new plays.

In other post-crisis environments, the electorate may demand something more like retribution, rather than reform, if they are angry over rising inequality or fearful of foreign threats. That is the mood in many countries now, the United States included. To an extent not seen in many decades, the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign has been dominated by populists, led on the right by the real estate billionaire Donald Trump and on the left by Bernie Sanders, who is calling for a political revolution against the “billionaire class.”
The language of class warfare rarely bodes well for an economy, especially if it pushes mainstream candidates to adopt more radical positions. Many of the Republican presidential candidates are vying with Trump to stake out the most hard-line positions on issues such as immigration, which could undermine the advantage the United States enjoys as a magnet for foreign talent.

TABITHA SOREN: Even though I was twenty-four, it seemed logical to me that I could cover a presidential race. I come from a middle-class background; my dad’s in the military. I went to college to get a job, not to get an education. As a freshman, I was already trying to find a place to work. In New York, I’d covered Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign. When I was in Vermont, I’d covered a gubernatorial race, as well as Bernie Sanders running for the House of Representatives. I had mayoral, gubernatorial, and congressional races under my belt. Dave Sirulnick was interested in having serious news, so I suggested we cover the presidential campaign. He said, “I’d have to have people who are really passionate about doing it.” And I said, “That would be me.”
ALISON STEWART: I was sitting in the newsroom and Dave Sirulnick walked through and said, “Alison, you like politics, right?

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg once introduced me at a public event as a Goldman guy; CBS newsman Harry Smith referred several times to my Goldman past during an interview; even Rahm’s wife once told me I must be looking forward to returning to Goldman.
Around that time, Senate majority leader Harry Reid—the only politician I knew who could match my clipped brevity on the phone—invited me to attend the regular lunch of the Senate Democratic caucus, our supposed allies on the Hill. But liberal populists dominated the room, and they didn’t display much affection toward me. I remember Senator Bernie Sanders, the lefty firebrand from Vermont, yelling about how the President had only Wall Street people around him. I listed some of the progressive economists on the President’s team, including Christy Romer, Jared Bernstein, Gene Sperling, and Alan Krueger, my chief economist at Treasury. I explained that I had never worked on Wall Street. But the prevailing mood was dismissive. Afterward, I told Pete Rouse, a legendary behind-the-scenes Senate power broker who was now the President’s counselor, how badly the meeting had gone.

“Private contracting companies have forfeited their right to represent the United States,” Schakowsky said, asserting that they “put our troops in harm’s way, and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians. They have become a liability instead of an asset.”200 Only a small fraction of the 435 legislators in the House signed on to support her bill and, as of spring 2008, only two senators—Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and New York’s Hillary Clinton.
Because of the Bush administration’s refusal to hold mercenary forces accountable for their crimes in Iraq and the Democrats’ unwillingness to effectively challenge the radically privatized war machine, the only hope the victims of Nisour Square have for justice lies in the lawsuit they filed against Blackwater in Washington, D.C. In some ways, that is the most logical place for such a trial to take place, because the violence unleashed by Blackwater in Iraq is ultimately rooted in the for-profit war machine based in the U.S. capital.

pages: 775words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by
Walter Scheidel

Two years earlier, multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett had complained that he and his “mega-rich friends” did not pay enough taxes. These sentiments are widely shared. Within eighteen months of its publication in 2013, a 700-page academic tome on capitalist inequality had sold 1.5 million copies and risen to the top of the New York Times nonfiction hardcover bestseller list. In the Democratic Party primaries for the 2016 presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders’s relentless denunciation of the “billionaire class” roused large crowds and elicited millions of small donations from grassroots supporters. Even the leadership of the People’s Republic of China has publicly acknowledged the issue by endorsing a report on how to “reform the system of income distribution.” Any lingering doubts are dispelled by Google, one of the great money-spinning disequalizers in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, which allows us to track the growing prominence of income inequality in the public consciousness (Fig.

Another disabled Vietnam veteran, a professor of history and political science at York College in Pennsylvania named Philip Avillo, wrote in a local newspaper: “Yes, we need to support our men and women under arms. But let’s support them by bringing them home; not by condoning this barbarous, violent policy.” In Salt Lake City, hundreds of demonstrators, many with children, marched through the city’s main streets chanting antiwar slogans.
In Vermont, which had just elected Socialist Bernie Sanders to Congress, over 2000 demonstrators disrupted a speech by the governor at the state house, and in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, 300 protesters walked through the downtown area, asking shop owners to close their doors in solidarity.
On January 26, nine days after the beginning of the war, over 150,000 people marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., and listened to speakers denounce the war, including the movie stars Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.